We’ve known for some time now that during sleep, the brain undergoes a memory spring cleaning of sorts, during which thoughts collected during that day are either converted into long-term memories or discarded.
It makes sense that this brain cleanse would occur at night when the brain is idle, considering there’s no way that even the enormous human brain could possibly have enough room for everything that we take in on a given day.
Until recently, researchers didn’t understand the mechanism for how the brain chooses what to keep. But, in a study recently published in the journal Science, researchers have demonstrated for the first time that during the day the brain goes through a series of steps in an effort to tag certain memories to be stored that night.
Researchers found that when the brain is idle during the day, simultaneous waves of neurons come together in what’s called ...
